The Sheikh's Collection. Оливия Гейтс
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But this was not any other woman. It was Sara. Fiery and beautiful Princess Sara. Stubborn and sensual Sara.
The elevator ride up to her apartment was torture. The heat at his groin almost too painful to endure. All he could see was the glimmer of gold as her dress highlighted every curve of her magnificent body, but her shoulders were stiff with tension and her face was still furious.
It seemed to take for ever before the lift pinged to a halt and they were back in her apartment again. The front door had barely closed behind them before she turned on him. ‘How dare you behave like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Coming over all possessive and squaring up to my boss like that!’
‘So why the sudden defence of Steel, Sara? Was he your lover? The man to whom you lost your innocence?’
‘Oh!’ Frustratedly, she stared at him for a piercing moment before turning her back and marching into the sitting room, just the way she’d done on Christmas Eve at the cottage. And just like then, he followed her—mesmerised by the shimmering sway of her bottom, until she turned round to glare at him again.
The violet flash in her eyes warned him not to continue with his line of questioning, but Suleiman found he was in the grip of an emotion far bigger than reason. ‘Was he?’ he demanded hotly. ‘Is that why he lent you his cottage? Why you were so keen to get to the party tonight?’
She shook her head. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? You don’t seem to realise that I’ve been living in England for all these years and I’m just not used to men behaving like this. It’s primitive. And it’s inappropriate.’
‘I don’t think it’s inappropriate,’ he ground out. ‘You told me that night that you were waiting for your lover and that it was Steel’s cottage. Then I discovered that you were not a virgin and so I put two and two together—’
‘And came up with a number which seems to have reached triple figures!’ she flared, before taking a deep breath as if she was trying to get her own feelings under control. ‘Look, I shouldn’t have said that about Gabe that night. I was trying to make you angry—and it seems that I have far exceeded my own expectations. I was hurling out stuff and hoping to get a reaction. But I said all that before we became...involved. For the record, Gabe has never been my lover. But even if he had...even if he had...that does not give you the right to just march up to him like that in public and start playing the jealousy card. I just don’t get it.’
‘What don’t you get?’ he demanded. ‘That a man should feel possessive about the woman he loves? Isn’t that a mark of the way he feels about her?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the way he feels about her—it’s more a mark of wanting to own her! Before you became Mr Oil Baron, you travelled for years on Murat’s behalf. Are you trying to tell me that this is the way you behaved whenever you met with some diplomat or politician whose ideas you didn’t happen to agree with? Going in with all guns blazing?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘On the contrary. One of the reasons I excel at card games is because I have the ability to conceal what I’m thinking.’
Slowly, she nodded her head ‘So what happened tonight?’
‘You did,’ he said. ‘You happened.’
‘You mean it’s something I did?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m having trouble working it out for myself. I’ve never felt this way about a woman before, and sometimes it scares the hell out of me. I’ve never wanted a woman in the way I want you, Sara.’
‘But wanting me doesn’t give you permission to behave like that towards Gabe. It doesn’t give you the right to start treating me like a thing. Like a valuable painting or some vase that you own, which nobody else is allowed to look at, because it’s all yours. I don’t want that.’
For a moment there was silence as he looked at her.
‘Then just what do you want, Sara?’ he questioned. ‘Because you don’t seem to want a normal relationship. Not from where I’m standing.’
‘That’s funny. A normal relationship? I don’t think you’d recognise one if you tripped over it in the street!’ she said. ‘And how could you? You’re possessive and demanding and insanely jealous.’
‘And you don’t think that you might have fed my instinct to be jealous?’
‘I’ve already explained about Gabe.’
‘I’m not talking about Gabe! I’m talking about the fact that ever since I’ve moved in here, you seem to be pushing me away. It’s like you’ve surrounded yourself with a glass wall and I just can’t get through to you.’
She felt the fear licking at the edges of her skin. Was that true—or did Suleiman just want to make her completely his, and to stamp out all her natural fire and independence?
She couldn’t risk it.
‘Oh, what’s the point?’ she said tiredly. ‘There is no point. We’ve shone the light on what we’ve got and seen all the gaping great cracks.’
‘I think you’ve made up your mind that it isn’t going to work,’ he said. ‘And maybe that’s the way it has to be. But since you’ve had your say, then let me have mine. And yes, I hold my hands up to all the charges you’ve just levelled at me. Yes, I’ve been “possessive and demanding and insanely jealous”. I’m not proud of the way I behaved earlier and I’m sorry. It’s been bubbling away for a while now and tonight it just seemed to spill over. But I wonder if you’ve stopped for a minute to ask yourself why?’
‘Because you’re still living in the Dark Ages? A typical desert male who will never change?’
He shook his head. ‘Let me tell you something else, Sara—that I may have failed to live up to your ideal of the ideal lover tonight, but I’ve sure as hell tried in other ways.’
‘How?’ She felt stupid standing there in her golden dress with her bangles dangling from her limp wrist. Like a butterfly which had been speared by a pin. ‘How have you tried?’
‘How? For a start, I have relocated into your poky London apartment—’
‘It is not poky!’
‘Oh, believe me,’ he said grimly, ‘it is. I’ve been trying to run a global business from the second bedroom and all I get from you is complaints about the phone ringing at odd hours.’
‘Is that all you get from me, Suleiman?’
He heard the unconsciously sultry note which had entered her voice and wondered if their angry words had scared her. And turned her on. Because didn’t women like to push a man to the brink—even though sometimes they didn’t like what happened when they got there?
‘No,’ he said. ‘I get a lot of good stuff, too. The best stuff ever, if you must know—but what we have is not sustainable.’
‘Not sustainable?’
He hardened his heart against the sudden darkening of her eyes and, even though he wanted to cross the room and pull her into his arms, he stood his ground. ‘You think I’m content to continue to be treated as some kind of mild irrelevance, while your job dominates everything?’
‘I told you that I needed to work.’
‘And I accepted that. I just hadn’t realised that you would be living at the office, virtually 24/7—as if you had to prove yourself. I don’t know if it was to me, or to your boss—to reassure him that you weren’t going to take off again. Or to show me that you’re an independent woman in your own right. But whatever it is—you aren’t facing up to the truth behind your actions.’
‘And you are, right?’
‘Maybe I am. And I’ll tell you what you seem so determined to ignore, if that’s